Monday, September 05, 2016 Swati Khandelwal
Rambler.ru, also known as Russia’s Yahoo, suffered a massive data breach in 2012 in which an unknown hacker or a group of hackers managed to steal nearly 100 Million user accounts, including their unencrypted plaintext passwords.
The data breach was reported by the same hacker using the [email protected] Jabber ID who handed LeakedSource over 43.5 Million user records from another 2012 hack suffered by the Last.fm music streaming service.
According to LeakedSource, none of the passwords were hashed, meaning the company stored its user’s password in an unencrypted plain text format that could allow the company as well as hackers to see passwords easily.
This is something similar to the VK.com breach, in which 171 Million users’ accounts were taken from the Russian social networking site, where passwords were also stored in plaintext format, without any hashing or salting.
Again, as expected, the most common passwords used by Rambler.ru users, includes “asdasd,” “123456,” “000000,” “654321,” “123321,” or “123123.”
LeakedSource has added the data into its database; so Rambler.ru users can check if they have been compromised by searching their account at Leaked Source’s search engine.Rambler.ru is the latest victim to join the list of “Mega-Breaches” revealed in recent months, when hundreds of Millions of online credentials from years-old data breaches on popular services, includingLinkedIn, MySpace, VK.com, Tumblr, and Dropbox, were exposed online.
Rambler has yet to respond to the incident.
The Bottom Line:
Users are advised to change their passwords for Rambler.ru account as well as other online accounts immediately, especially those using the same passwords.
Moreover, I always encourage users to make use of password managers that create strong and complex passwords for different websites as well as remember them on your behalf.
I have listed some of the best password managers that could help you understand the importance of password manager as well as choose one according to your requirement.
